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In interviews with more than 100 digital leaders on the Technovation podcast in 2021, executives noted artificial intelligence, cloud, and analytics among the technologies that show the most potential inside their organizations. Executives also noted the need to defend their organizations from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and efforts to scale automation efforts.

Below is a list of the top 10 technology trends on technology leaders’ minds in 2021, as well as a glimpse of topics rising in importance in the year ahead.

The chart above notes the percentage of interviewees who noted the listed technology topics as an area of interest and focus for the future. (Source: Metis Strategy analysis of Technovation with Peter High podcast interviews)

AI, cloud, and analytics remain top of mind 

During an unprecedented year of digital acceleration, Technovation guests described the ways in which technology has become even further ingrained in the fabric of business operations, transforming the way customers consume products and services. “Every decision we make as executives has a fundamental aspect of technology in the discussion,” said Greg Carmichael, Chief Executive Officer at Fifth Third Bancorp, after seeing a sustained 20% increase in digital channel usage since the start of the pandemic. To navigate the operational changes required in an increasingly digital world, AI and data analytics have enabled organizations to deliver deeper insights with greater speed than ever before.  

Alongside AI and analytics efforts, technology executives increased their focus on cloud. At Whirlpool, CIO Danielle Brown is taking a cloud-first approach for critical systems and data. “You are able to leverage data not just in functional silos, but across multiple functions within the business (and) across regions in a more easy and accessible way,” she said. Leveraging cloud analytics and productivity solutions has enabled Whirlpool to deliver systems and applications crucial to business on highly elastic infrastructure, which allows the company to grow and adapt quickly as business conditions change.

The shift to cloud has also created new opportunities for AI to transform business insights and operations. During a December conference, Target CIO Mike McNamara said he views AI and analytics as the key to his company’s success. AI “has been a really exciting avenue of discovery for the future and a great source of competitive advantage for the business,” he said. Applications across Target include demand forecasting, ordering, workload planning, pricing and promotions, among other tasks. 

Looking to the year ahead, CommScope CIO Praveen Jonnala shared his plans to continue adopting AI and ML capabilities “to provide deeper insights that really unleash opportunities within the company and for our customers.” 

The cybersecurity landscape grows more complex

The transition to remote and hybrid work presented many CIOs with an alarming increase in cybersecurity threats. As Pacific Life CIO Mike Shadle noted: “With the pandemic and with the hybrid workforce, you now have to be secure everywhere,” including well beyond the traditional four walls of a corporate HQ. The price for not being prepared is high. In 2021 alone, average data breach costs increased from $3.86 million to $4.24 million, a historic high, according to an IBM Cost of Data Breach Report

In response to an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape, including steady reports of ransomware and awareness of new vulnerabilities across software supply chains, many companies accelerated their investments in security to protect valuable data and mitigate risk across distributed work environments.

We expect more investment in the year ahead, and anticipate that technology leaders will double down on efforts to make cybersecurity a key part of ongoing transformation initiatives. “Cybersecurity is not only the technology, the process, the detection prevention mechanisms, or the response recovery mechanisms,” said Ameren Chief Digital Information Officer Bhavani Amirthalingam. “Creating a culture of cybersecurity is extremely important.” 

RPA accelerates automation opportunities 

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) gained a foothold in many organizations over the past few years and has continued to scale in 2021. As organizations seek to automate a broader range of processes, tools like RPA are enabling employees to take on higher-order work. At Guardian Life, a program called “Automation for Good” seeks to do just that, with software taking over transaction-heavy tasks and freeing up technologists to tackle more complex issues. “Why not allow them to be able to self-automate and identify those tasks that they wish they did not have to do in the first place, and then create a much more fulfilling job for themselves,” said Dean Del Vecchio, Guardian Life’s CIO and Chief of Operations

Beyond RPA, automakers like Toyota have taken advantage of automation on the factory floor. In an interview, Toyota Financial Services CIO Vipin Gupta said he believes “we will see a series of innovative techniques used by large enterprises to define these new workflows for IT that will become highly automated. So, for example, today in our Toyota factories over 90% of tasks to assemble a car are automated. IT will mature to the same levels this decade.”

Manufacturing companies like Advance Auto Parts have begun implementing RPA to drive automation efforts forward. While RPA is not a new trend, CIO Sri Donthi said, “it is a trend that we are really focused on, given we are building a lot of common platforms. Now, I can really apply more RPA as a capability to drive this hyper-automation that is really needed.”  

Quantum computing cracks the list for the first time

Quantum computing, while still in its nascent stages, continues to catch the attention of CIOs. Recent developments from companies such as Intel Corporation suggest quantum may be closer to entering the mainstream conversation. For example, Intel Labs’s Senior Fellow and Managing Director Rich Uhlig said the company is exploring post-quantum cryptography and its implications for cybersecurity and data protection. “We are improving the algorithms, improving the accelerators for these algorithms and making them resilient against a quantum attack,” he said.

Another driver behind quantum’s growing recognition is its concrete use cases, particularly for analyzing large data sets. When considering use cases in pharmaceuticals, Merck Chief Information and Digital Officer Dave Williams says he thinks quantum could provide value by surmounting complex issues such as weather prediction, human biology, accelerating drug discovery and development, and encryption. He notes that use cases may be five to 10 years from the mainstream, but that quantum nevertheless “is going to be one to watch and really keep an eye on.” Blue Shield of California CIO Lisa Davis noted that it stands to fundamentally change the ways in which organizations solve problems and could allow organizations to find new ways to model and prepare for future crisis events. 

Trends likely to rise in 2022

In addition to the topics noted above, other trends show signs of gaining traction in 2022:

As the world enters year three of the COVID-19 pandemic, technology leaders continue to adapt to new ways of working while managing a fast-growing digital agenda. Much of that work involves developing people, processes, and technologies that allow their organizations to adapt and pivot quickly as new challenges and opportunities arise. Stay tuned to Technovation in 2022 for more discussions about the transformative technologies driving organizations forward. 

Nearly a decade ago, Metis Strategy President Peter High coined the term “CIO-plus” to describe CIOs who were expanding beyond their core IT roles and taking on more customer-focused and strategic responsibilities. Fast forward to 2020, when a Deloitte study found that 40% of CEOs see their CIO and tech leaders as the primary partners in driving business strategy, more than all other C-suite roles combined. 

CIOs already played an essential role in transforming their organizations to compete in the digital age, even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to alter their strategies and operating models practically overnight. A broad shift to remote work put CIOs even more in the spotlight, giving them a more prominent seat at the table as digital acceleration took hold.  

That acceleration shifted CIO priorities and changed the trends on technology leaders’ roadmaps. In conversations with nearly 100 CIOs and technology leaders in 2020 as part of our podcast, Technovation with Peter High, we observed an increased focus on collaboration tools. Technologies such as cloud, AI, and analytics remained top of mind for many executives, but conversations now focused on business and strategic implications. 

Source: Metis Strategy analysis of Technovation with Peter High podcast

Below, we take a closer look at the trends and insights behind the data and get a glimpse of what’s to come in 2021.

Digital transformation accelerates

Throughout our conversations with tech CXOs, one thing we heard consistently was that the pandemic accelerated the overall shift to digital. “We have seen a massive acceleration in trends we were already seeing,” said Ed Mclaughlin, President of Operations & Technology at Mastercard. “We felt we were about three years away from digital supremacy, [but] that actually happened this year.”

At MGM International, then-President of Commercial and Growth Atif Rafiq noted that efforts to develop a mobile check-in capability were accelerated by nine months. Meanwhile, at Domino’s, Chief Innovation Officer Dennis Maloney shared that the percentage of sales coming through digital channels rose from 65% to 75% as a result of a “massive movement [of] consumers into digital ordering platforms.” 

From internal efforts like the shift to a digital workforce or adoption of best-of-breed SaaS tools to external trends such as the explosion of e-commerce and changing customer expectations, it’s clear that COVID-19 massively accelerated the digital trends that have been gaining momentum for years. Technology executives who recognize that changes they thought were several years away are here today will be the ones best positioned to help their organizations thrive. 

Cloud-based collaboration tools explode

As mentioned above, cloud-based communication and collaboration tools exploded in 2020. Less than 4% of technology leaders mentioned tools like Zoom, Slack, or Microsoft Teams in 2019, but in 2020, nearly a quarter of interviewees discussed video conferencing, chat platforms, and similar capabilities. That was certainly the case at Ally Financial, which hit more than a million minutes per day on Zoom during the pandemic, according to Sathish Muthukrishnan, the company’s Chief Information, Data, and Digital Officer. 

As CIOs remain focused on empowering remote workforces, we expect to see companies accelerate adoption of cloud-based capabilities while strengthening fundamentals such as security, bandwidth, redundancy, and availability. As the “new normal” slowly emerges, CIOs and digital leaders who have successfully enabled employees to turn their homes into an office will then have an opportunity to help define how technology can differentiate the in-office experience and define the vision for a hybrid work experience.

Data, analytics & AI drive automation

Artificial intelligence continues to dominate the mindshare of CIOs and digital leaders. It was the top tech trend mentioned on the podcast for the third year in a row. At our Metis Strategy Digital Symposium in January, when asked which emerging technology holds the most promise for companies in 2021, 60% of the executives responded with “advanced AI.” 

At NetApp, CIO Bill Miller rolled out over 150 software bots to optimize workflows ranging from legal and procurement to HR, supply chain, and customer service. Meanwhile, at Intel, Global CIO Archana Deskus noted how the company is applying data, analytics, and AI to the domains of business outcome optimization, product and service design, and manufacturing optimization. 

As the volume of data continues to explode, opportunities around AI, analytics, and automation will only increase. While we encourage organizations to accelerate their shift to an AI-first business model, it is important to do so while considering the strategic, ethical, and societal implications. At Mars, for example, CDO Sandeep Dadlani is looking to leverage automation not to replace workers, but to reduce menial tasks and empower associates to focus on more meaningful activities. Meanwhile, Bank of America Chief Operations and Technology Officer Cathy Bessant led the formation of the Council on the Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence, in partnership with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, to explore ethical and policy issues related to AI.

Looking to the future, CIOs and digital leaders who not only understand the technical aspects of data and AI, but also the broader business and societal implications, will be best positioned to lead their organizations’ AI transformation. 

We expect more companies to see results from AI initiatives in the year ahead. We are also seeing an increased focus on the underlying tools and technologies that enable these initiatives and increasing occurrences of companies developing data strategies.

Trends likely to rise in 2021

In addition to the major technology trends noted above, there are a few topics noted by CIOs that are worth mentioning, as they show signts of gaining importance in 2021: